Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the R. STAHL AG Investors and Analysts Conference call for the first half of 2025. I am Jutta, the call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Judith Schäuble, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you Jutta. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome also from my side and thank you for joining our today's conference call. Our prepared slides are available under the Investor Relations theme of our website, www.r-stahl.com. Shortly after we have finished this call, a replay of the entire conference will be provided for download at the same time. Please be aware of our disclaimer statement which you will find at the beginning of the slide deck. Now I will pass on to Dr. Mathias Hallmann, our Group CEO, who will walk you through our presentation. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Also, a warm welcome to the 2025 Analysts and Investors Conference call. I will start with the summary. We had a quite difficult quarter driven by huge economic uncertainties. Our orders saw a massive drop to €67 million, prior year €88.5 million. Some of you may know we had €98 million in the first quarter, so that's a drop of more than 30% to Q1. We saw especially significant declines in the Central Region and in Asia-Pacific. As a consequence, we saw decreasing sales with a year-on-year decline of 13% to €77.9 million and that all resulted in a lower EBITDA which came out at €5.3 million and an EBITDA pre-margin of 6.8% where we had 12.2% the year before. Free cash flow was €3 million to minus €9.1 million, mainly driven by the lower profitability. Net profits came out with a loss of €2.5 million, prior year of €3.7 million and the shares at minus €38, prior year was plus €57. If we look into the regions you see declining sales in America, Asia-Pacific, not so much in the Central Region where we were benefiting from a strong order backlog. I just mentioned that the Central Region also the order entry went down significantly in the second quarter. Looking then into the profitability or the P&L statement we can summarize that we have two issues. The one is the top line and the other is the personnel cost. The top line came down as mentioned from roughly €90 million to roughly €78 million. That also resulted in a lower total operational performance. Material costs look a little bit higher or they are higher, but that's mainly driven by a buildup of unfinished and finished goods while we had in the last year a negative effect in the finished and unfinished goods. That's clearly related then to the material cost overall. We see no problems in our material cost. Personnel costs remain almost stable as we have some severance payments of €1.2 million in the second quarter. Without that we would see reduced personnel costs o perating expenses are on the level of the year before and then all it boils down to the slightly negative EBIT and negative net profit of minus €2.5 million as just reported. As I said in the beginning, the problem clearly comes from the top line which is significantly reduced since last year. Even we had, again, inflation between last year and this year so the actual decline is even a little bit higher. On the other hand we see a deflation in our cost structure. This is something we are working against and we will come to that pretty soon after the next slide. Free cash flow, already mentioned, is negative. The main effect comes from the net profit where we fall down from €3.7 million last year to minus €2.5 million t hat brings a change of €6 million. We have a buildup of working capital in the second quarter. We expect that to come down in the consecutive quarters. Nevertheless, all that results in a negative free cash flow of minus €9 million. That drives a higher net debt, which is now at a level of €44.6 million. Some of you might have read it already, we are addressing our structural condition at this point of time. I just mentioned we think we do have our material costs and our other operating costs well under control. What we cannot control is our personnel costs. In order to reduce that we closed one of our production sites, a small production site in Oslo. We did that during the second quarter, w e saw a reduction of 12 employees there. In Germany, we started a socially balanced structural personnel adjustment program using the tool of Transfergesellschaft. Employees are transferred in this new company in order to get further qualified for the open shop market. They can remain there up to 12 months. The target we have is a reduction of around 80 employees until the middle of next year with a cost reduction of up to €10 million per year. I think I should say it should not be less than 80 FTEs or employees looking at the current economic situation. The severance payments we used for that in the second quarter totals at the level of €1.1 million. That brings me to the outlook we had with our guidance for the year in the light of the current economic environment. We previously forecasted our sales on a level of €340 million to €350 million. We now expect €320 million to €330 million which requires significant improvement especially in Q2 and Q3 and we do see that in the month of July, w e feel safe at this point of time with this forecast of €320 million to €330 million. The EBITDA is expected between €25 million and €30 million. Previously, we expected €35 million to €40 millionand w e expect a somewhat balanced free cash flow. Previously, we were expecting a middle single-digit euro million amount, a positive middle single-digit million amount. We will see a slight decrease in our equity ratio under the assumption that the interest level for the valuation of our pension remains stable. The risks are clear; w e see the economic risk, w e see the geopolitical conflict. This is something we have to have an eye on. At this point of time, I think this is a pretty stable outlook and we are confident to keep it towards the end of the year. This is it and now w e are open for questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touchstone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use only handsets when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from the line of Harald Hoff with MWB Research. Please go ahead. Thank you, Dr. Hallmann for taking my question and hello to everybody. Just two questions from my side. The first one is regarding the personnel cost effect. You mentioned the $10 million in savings. Can you provide a little bit more color? When do we see these effects? Do we expect them in H2 2025 already, at least partially? Do we have some further one-offs regarding the payment for the employees? The other question is regarding the EPs for the full year earnings. Part of your guidance is that you are expecting a decline in the equity ratio which indicates that the net profit will come in slightly negative for the full year. Is that correct, or did I misunderstand this? Second question, correct? Yes. With this guidance, and if we don't see positive tax effects or something we would expect a slightly negative earnings per share. First question, effects from the personnel reduction. What we see right now is that we have the charges for the Transfergesellschaft, which we have especially in the second half of the year. We already have some personnel cost reduction, but the main effect we will see in the year 2026. Okay, thanks a lot. The next question comes from the line of Klaus Schlotter with Solventis. Please go ahead. Yes. Good morning. I've got a question regarding the top line development. It looks like it's all macro-driven, It's politics, It's all trade restrictions whatsoever but it's not really caused by your products or changes in the situation in the sector. The question is, you're really depending regarding the top line only on the macro developments. You really cannot steer against from the micro point of view or would you see that differently? I mean, you're absolutely right. In the long term and also in the short term we can hardly work against the market. Certainly, we can, in the long term try to get more market share and we quite successfully manage that especially in the DACH region and in Europe over the last couple of years. In the short term and in the midterm we are heavily depending on the economic conditions. The competitive landscape didn't change. I don't think that we have new competitors or technological changes or anything is driving all that we see nothing of that It's just that we miss a significant portion of our business and that's projects. Normally, we have roughly 20% to 25% of our business as big projects. What happens right now is these projects are in the market. The pipelines are full, t he financing is there. The projects are generally approved, but they are not starting. There's so much uncertainty in the markets that everybody is holding back final decisions, t his is what we see. We hardly see those projects happening and that's really harming us. The second effect, which is not that critical but it's also part of the situation is the general weakness of the European economy especially in the chemical fields. This is also something where we are suffering from because we are historically a very strong anti-chemical industry. This is where R. STAHL AG came from, especially in the DACH region and w e all know that this industry is suffering, t hose are the two main effects. You're absolutely right that there's no change in the competitive environment. What about the U.S. dollar which was devaluating over the last month? I think it's even exceeding the tax rate of 15%. How is that affecting you? Not that much, w e do have a factory. There are two things; First we do have a factory in Houston so w e have quite some value added there. When you look at the import part from our components there's a lot of automation products and almost all automation players are coming from outside. There is almost no local competition nobody really producing in the dollar area. Everybody has the same problem. The dollar is not really impacting us that much. It's the tariffs and even more the uncertainty in the markets. What about your investment projects in Asia? As I remember, also in the U.S., how is that proceeding? Is that finished yet, or? We started two significant investment projects. One was the expansion of the factory in Weimar, our lighting factory, t hat's finished. The official opening will be in August but it's already finished. The second is a significant expansion in India and that's ongoing. It is clear for us that we will continue with that because we do need a stronger footprint in that part of the region for the further expansion in that part of the region but also to have a place where we can have some labor-intensive, not so much technology-intensive work done. Therefore, we have ongoing investments in India, and those will also continue in this situation. Of course, the Asia-Pacific market was quite weak for you. It was quite weak but we cannot base investment decisions only on a quarterly development, India is not only for Asia. It's also important for the European sector and it's important for North America. Even when we saw these, we see these tariffs of 30% now from India to North America we would not expect that those remain forever. Regarding the personnel cost reductions, is that already on the balance sheet for the cost for reducing by 80 people? What we have in the balance sheet is severance payments of €1.1 million which we paid for roughly 30 people who have signed their contracts until the 30th of June. In the meantime, we have 20 more. Those will then show up in the third quarter from a severance pay perspective. We do have a cash flow effect from the payments to the Transfergesellschaft, but they don't show up in the P&L at this point of time. Okay. The last point, you said you see improvement in Q3. In July, June is just once but maybe there's some starting and then kind of continuing improvement during H2. Can you put some more color on that? Where is it taking place the improvement? Can you locate that? Yeah. It's a general thing that right now we will see especially in Q3 deliveries from our order backlog, bigger projects in many regions. We saw a slight improvement in the order intake also in July. It's two effects; t he one is that we still have some significant orders in the backlog, t he other thing is a slightly improving order intake. Both effects resulted in a quite strong July. Now we have to see what August and September will deliver, but we are slightly more optimistic than in Q2. Okay then. Thank you. Thank you.